Key issue

Our experts and our passion are pretty renowned within Linney Group. Many of the visitors to our business sense our people are passionate about what they do, but what does it mean and why should we be?

There is no doubt that, out there in the marketplace, things are massively challenging and competitive. Those words alone can be sanitised because they have been said so often, we forget what they mean. To remind us, competitive and challenging means that there are other people and other businesses who want what we have – namely our jobs and our standard of living and they will do whatever they can to pinch them from us. These are what are called ‘market forces’.

So, can we protect ourselves from them? Not without being pretty special. There are lots of adequate or average or nothing special businesses that can, sort of, have a shot at supplying what we do. It will be difficult for them because we have spent a lot of money to get to where we are (called ‘well invested’) but they will try, and quite often price is their main weapon, as opposed to service, clever innovation and creativity. All these things are, of course, driven by our people and this is where the passion and our experts come in.

It may be useful to reflect on a passion junkie who, sadly, has just left this world, Steve Jobs of Apple. After reading his obituaries, a friend of mine said: “It’s as if the President of America has died.” Indeed the obits were astonishing. He grew up in an orphanage, he fiddled around at school, he dropped out of college and university. He loved typography, thinking it was beautiful and he hated the way that the computers of the day made type look awful. So, his passion drove him to help create a computer that produced beautiful type, the famous Apple Macs. He invented the mouse to make things easier and the whole design world fell in love with his products. Then he got sacked!

While away from Apple, Steve acquired the computer graphics division of Lucasfilm Ltd, which was spun off as Pixar, a film business that made some of the most successful animated movies ever. Apple collapsed without him and he was asked back. Second time around he was like a tsunami, creating faster and better desktop Macs, iPods, iTunes, iPhones, iPads and literally changed the world. He had a passion and huge attention to detail, apparently spending hours perfecting the little waste bin that is visible on Apple products. By the sound of things, he was a bit weird as well… but he really had passion and he really was an expert.

Somewhere, deep inside all of us, is a passion. In the business, we are lucky that a lot of us are passionate about what we do. That doesn’t mean we are deeply in love with what we do, it means we care about it. It annoys us if things are not as good as they should be. We keep trying to improve everything all the time. We recognise that some people are more expert at some things than we are and we go and talk to them and learn from them. They are happy to help us because they have passion too. These are the best tools we have to fight the good fight that is always being fought in the marketplace, and these tools will help to keep us ahead of the price ‘only average’ brigade BUT we have to keep ahead of that brigade and passion and experts are key.

Sporty night

Two tables of Linney Group sports enthusiasts recently attended a Sportsman’s Dinner at the Civic Centre organised by the Armchair Club. It was organised to raise money to help local athletes who are preparing for the London 2012 Olympics.

Linney Print’s Martin Rowbottom told 1851: “We sat down to a traditional three-course dinner that warmed us up on a chilly October evening! After which Jonathan Agnew, the BBC’s cricket commentator told stories of his playing career for Leicester and England as well as stories about his travels around the globe commentating on the England Cricket Team games.

“After a brief break for drinks, Yorkshire comedian Mike Farrell entertained us for the best part of an hour with his brilliant stand-up routine.”

Jeans for Genes

A good cause prompted people’s conscience to help raise money for charity and have fun at the same time on Friday 7 October for ‘Jeans for Genes Day’.

‘Jeans for Genes Day’ is a national appeal where everyone is invited to wear jeans or casual clothes and to donate money to help four national charities: Great Ormond Street Hospital, The Primary Immunodeficiency Association, The Chronic Granulomatous Disorder Research Trust and The Society of Mucopolysaccharide Diseases.

One baby in every 30 is born with a genetic disorder or birth defect, which is equivalent to one born every 26 minutes; our ‘Jeans’ players helped this cause by raising £152.50 – no doubt we will do it all again next year.

The Linney Cup 2011

The fourth annual Linney Group seven-a-side football tournament kicked off on Sunday 21 August at 2pm. In total six teams gathered to contest the Linney Cup; Direct Digital, Print Office, Linney Design, Direct Office/IT, Linney Group FC and Team Bellamy.

Every team had to play every other team in five 20-minute games. After a tiring competition filled with hard tackles, brilliant goals, a little controversy and a grim determination, the Direct Digital team were crowned champions.

Team captain Richard Townsend said: “It was a great performance from the whole team who all gave 150 per cent, to ensure victory.”

The tournament was extremely close with only two points separating five teams going into the last game. The final results were Direct Digital 1st, Linney Group FC and Print Office joint 2nd, Linney Design 4th, Team Bellamy (twice previous winners) 5th and Direct Office/IT 6th.

Goal of the tournament went to Geoff Alvey (pictured here). Previous winner Darren Drake explained: “Geoff cut inside to go past Mark Bradley, then skipped past Brooksy on the outside before firing a thunderbolt from the left of the pitch, just past the halfway line – it was an amazing goal, nearly as good as mine last year!”

Special mention goes to Jim Varney, Direct Digital coach, who, in a great show of integrity, gave a controversial penalty against his own teammates.

MakerBot 3D printer

We have been printing for years but all of a sudden along comes 3D printing which is pretty hard to understand if you haven’t seen it. The MakerBot Thing-O-Matic® 3D printer is a breakthrough in 3D printing technology and Linney Design couldn’t wait to get their hands on one!

Iain Swales tells 1851: “The MakerBot arrived last week. After some serious head scratching we’ve managed to make it produce pretty reliably. It’s a proper geek project involving some inside knowledge on stepper-motors, COMport USB connections, Skeinforge profiles and an extremely convoluted wiki... but… we can now make things exist outside the computer!

“The christened by us ‘MakerBeast’ extrudes ABS plastic, available in various colours including glow-in-the-dark green, to ‘print out’ three dimensional models we have produced in 3D Studio or SolidWorks.

“The first step for us is to print out a range of test models to figure out its limitations, next steps to produce proof of concept models for our clients. Expect more pictures soon when we link it up to ZBrush, for some realistic organic models.

“If you’d like to see it in action, then please do drop by the multimedia area in Linney Design for a demonstration.”